We're infatuated with Siri on our iPhones, and wish something similar existed for Linux. Turns out, it does exist. Almost. An interesting article by a guy who seems to know a lot about the Xvoice project, and an invitation to get involved. The best open source adventures start like this.

Asus is the company that shook up the laptop market a couple of years ago with their introduction of the EeePC netbook. And with their announcement that they will no longer be producing netbooks in 2013, Charles Arthur over at the Guardian UK has declared that the netbook era has now come to an end. Sad news for those of us who still love our netbooks! Harry McCracken over at Time Mag thinks they'll be back. Anybody who spends time wiping the smears off their tablet's touchscreen might agree.

ROSALabs has released 'Desktop Fresh', the latest version of its Linux desktop environment. Mandriva collaborated with ROSALabs in early 2012, but this desktop isn't Mandriva-specific. The new version boasts improved boot time, a social media app called TimeFrame, and an original launcher app called SimpleWelcome, all somewhat modified to accommodate tablet/phone interfaces.

Want to run FreeBSD on your Raspberry Pi or other ARM-based device? You're not far away from being able to do so. The folks over at the FreeBSD Developers Notebook report huge gains made in running FreeBSD on ARM v6 processors. They've got builds prepared for the Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard, and several others, though support isn't yet total. What can you do with it? Lots of stuff, like running the Go programming language on it like Dave Cheney. Cool!

Doesn't matter which OS you're running, somewhere in there, your system depends on Perl to get stuff done. Perl turned 25 years old on December 19th. Though venerable old version 5 remains the most popular, many have moved onto Perl 6, which intentionally broke compatibility and still isn't officially 'production ready.' I can't imagine administering a system without Perl though, so tonight I'm raising a glass of champagne in the direction of founder and creator Larry Wall.

I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner - Apple's Platinum and QNX' PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it's-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of '90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck's Skulpture.

"Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user's real IP/location. This is because Whonix consists of two (virtual) machines. One machine solely runs Tor and acts as a gateway, which we call Whonix-Gateway. The other machine, which we call Whonix-Workstation, is on a completely isolated network. Only connections through Tor are possible."

With Enlightment 0.17 released, it's no surprise the Linux distribution that uses E17 for its desktop is rushing to release a new version that uses it. Look for Bodhi 2.2.0 in January, featuring the stable E17 desktop. If you've never experienced it, Bodhi is a Ubuntu derivative, and it offers more configurabality than you can imagine. Have you been complaining about Unity and Gnome3 taking away your options? Bodhi and E17 bring them back - and many more, too.

The FreeBSD project has announced the immediate release of version 9.1, featuring a new Intel GPU driver and dozens of other drivers, an optional new C+11 stack, lots of improvements to IPv6 hardware offload support, and more. You can now run a ZFS file system in a jail, and the kernel now provides support for IronLake, SandyBridge, and IvyBridge CPUs. Check out the release notes for the juicy details.

The openSUSE community has elected its new board of directors, who will take office in January 2013. Welcome to Raymond Wooninck and Robert Schweikert, who will have a lot of work ahead of them as the board helps navigate openSUSE through some choppy waters. openSUSE remains one of the most popular Linux distros around, but their delayed release of 12.2 in September has led the team to spend the last six months reworking their development process, and both new members are planning to prioritize improvement of openSUSE's communication strategies as well.

Engadget got to play with Salfish. "Overall, we came away reasonably impressed with Sailfish OS, despite experiencing only a fraction of its functionality. Performance was decent considering the N950's relatively modest single-core underpinnings - then again, MeeGo's no slouch either."

It's sad that we need this, but alas - Matthew Garret has made a list of Linux distributions that boot on Windows 8 PCs with Secure Boot enabled. Tellingly enough, the list is short. Very short. Can someone hack this nonsense into oblivion please?

"The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities." The crazy thing is not that China is tightening its control over the internet. No, the crazy thing is that if it were up to our own politicians, western governments should do the same.

"We just licked the stamps and waved a fond farewell to 1200 OUYA Developer Consoles. These are the early versions of OUYA that developers will use to start making games. They're on their way to developers around the globe - by land, air and sea. OK, only by air - we want you to get them quick. Devs, expect them on your doorstep within the next few days." The SDK has been released as well.